Ron @ POB has a new post on his prediction that peak is right now,
He also has a nice debate with commenter MikeB (who some would recognize here by a different handle from the "olden days") Italics are the commentor
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')i]Peak oil is not a theory–but not for the reasons the author thinks. He is declaiming the popular definition, that is, “hunch or guess.”
No, that is simply not the popular definition of a “theory”. The popular definition, not the scientific one, is that a theory is an unproven hypothesis. That is not what a theory is.
Peak oil, on the the other hand, is a prediction, and one based on terrible data, in my opinion, because it depends on too many unknowns.Yes there are a lot of unknowns in the oil world. My prediction does consider those unknowns but it is based primarily on the knowns, not the unknowns. The data, while far from perfect, is not terrible. We know, approximately, how much oil is produced every, day, month and year. Not exactly but close enough. But more important we know how much it cost to produce that oil. And we know how the price of producing a barrel of oil has risen over time. Those are hard known facts.
Does anyone really know how much recoverable oil is in the ground, and at what price?
No and it simply doesn’t matter. What we do know is that all new discoveries get smaller, deeper, and far more expensive every year.
Does anyone really know what future technological advancements will bring?
We know they won’t bring miracles. And we know they will not likely arrive this year, in time to head off peak oil.
Does anyone know what future consumer behavior will look like? I certainly don’t. No one does.
Bullshit! That is the one thing we do know. Consumers will behave in the future exactly like they have behaved in the past. We have centuries of history to tell us how consumers behave. They will continue to believe everything will be fine until it isn’t fine anymore. Then they will panic, creating runs on banks and stores. Human nature doesn’t change.
Those who claim to have better “knowledge” to make such predictions are fooling themselves and a whole lot of others.
I am not claiming any special knowledge, just the facts that are right there before our eyes. Economical and geological facts are there. Pretending that they are not there is a fool’s game.
If the water is rising behind the dam, exceeding the limits of what the dam was engineered to hold back then people will start predicting when the dam will break. One person may say the dam will break when the water is two feed above the safe level. And he was wrong. Another said the dam will break when it is five feet above the safe engineered level. And even though cracks start to appear in the dam he was wrong. Another predicts a higher level and so on. And even more cracks appear. The point is we know the dam will break if the water keeps rising. Therefore every wrong prediction only increases the odds that the next one will be right. Only a damn fool would believe otherwise.
So tell me about Simmons and Hirsch and whomever. Go ahead, I really don’t mind. Because I know that even if I am wrong that only increases the odds that the next peak oil prognosticator will be right.